A San Diego sports anchor has been suspended from work for a week without pay for comments he made about Nascar driver Danica Patrick during a live broadcast.
The sports segment focused on Danica’s move from indie driver to Nascar driver and showed a clip of her talking about her distaste for the words used to describe female athletes, particularly descriptions of their looks, such as “sexy”.
The anchor responded, “I’ve got a few words. It’s starts with a ‘b’ and it’s not beautiful.”
The more I watch this video, the more annoyed I get. Not only does the anchor basically call Patrick a bitch, but he kind of misses the entire point of her empowering message. It’s no secret that the media treats women athletes differently than men. Instead of taking this opportunity to discuss that, he feeds into the cycle.
I was livid when he said, “What’s not attractive is, she’s sexy and she knows it.” Seriously?! Since when is being confident such a terrible quality to have? Men are praised for being confident but according to this anchor, a woman is a looked down on for it. Double standard much?
He goes on to say, “She always has a chip on her shoulder.” Why? Because she’s a confident woman who’s making headlines in a male-dominated sport. Whether or not she’s a good at her job I don’t know, (full disclosure: I’m not interested in Nascar) but that wasn’t the issue brought up in this news segment.
Here’s the video. What do you think of this anchor’s comments?
[video:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K4lzRgNUkaw 425×344]
Image Credit: Us Weekly
